From Biomaterials to Biomanufacturing Today & the Next 10-50years of Materials Chemistry & Materials Science

In my earlier post (cf. Saturday, 8 March 2008 Introduction to RSC's Journal of Materials Chemistry below) I reported the 13 fields defined by the RSC for their contributors to (& readers of) their journal the "Journal of Materials Chemistry":

From the defined 13 main fields the first was:

1.BiomaterialsIncluding reviews on drug delivery, implants and bio-mimetic synthesis.

It also transpired from my very first posts which kicked off this web-log series, (Friday, 22 February 2008 "Materials Chemistry Defined" & web-log on this subject on Monday, September 17, 2007. on my original log: "Conversations-on-Innovations". that application - applied science, are major motivations for Materials Chemists.

Applications and their scientific foundations obviously under-pin the "Conversations" themes of my very first web-logs. It follows that the recent Roadmap report from MIT, via NIST Tech Beat text below, may be of primordial interest to the entrepreneurial faction of the materials chemistry, materials science and engineering professions. Finally, before you read the text or visit the MIT pdf file, let me add that the importance of Roadmaps in "all fields" has been increasing in my mind and since my recent refs ( "The Top Ten Advances in Materials Science & What will define the next 50 years of Materials Science? THE MATERIALS TODAY ROADMAP CHALLENGE
["THE MATERIALS TODAY CHALLENGE - In Search of Materials Science Foresight- Road Maps throughout the next 50years!" recorded also in "Conversations-[link]" I shall treat these themes as often as possible

TEXT: "New Report Outlines Research Roadmap for Bio-manufacturing
On-line process tools, improved sensor calibration and analytical and data analysis methods are among the technological challenges facing the bio manufacturing industry over the next 10 years to greatly increase manufacturing efficiency for protein drugs while ensuring safety, according to industry, government and academic experts.
The analysis was developed during a special brainstorming session as part of the annual meeting of the International Foundation for Process Analytical Chemistry (IFPAC) held at the end of January. Representatives from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) co-chaired a session to develop a vision for the future of bio-manufacturing that attracted representatives from pharmaceutical companies, vendors, academia, research and development labs and other interested parties.
These improved measurement standards and technologies are essential initial steps towards the group’s “blue sky vision” for the future of bio-manufacturing. In this vision, bio-reactors will mimic the cellular signaling and regulation systems of higher order living systems by regulating nutrients and waste with built in mechanisms to allow real-time analysis and control of fermentation, monitor metabolism and impact of variables within the system.
The group detailed some of the challenges facing the industry over the next 10 years and announced their intention to stimulate discussion and cooperation among stakeholders, including the federal government, academia, and research interests, as a way to address those technological and scientific hurdles.
The team also planned future sessions for the rest of the year, including conferences and site visits scheduled for the summer and fall of 2008 and further workshops to set research priorities during the fall of 2008. "

To read the full report, see IFPAC 2008: A 10 year Vision for Biotechnology Manufacturing Session

Good reading.

Introduction to RSC's Journal of Materials Chemistry

Biodiversity, variety may be
the spice of life

and arguably the mother (code?)

of invention,

too much brain dispersion may become

pathological,

to any over-ambitious

weblogger.

Since opening these posts, I have been asking myself, if it would be wiser to look more at science and engineering definitions in the same way as the RSC's Materials Chemists did in order to get the wider picture of scientific & technological endeavour, and undoubted scientific progress and highlight specifically the Materials Scientists role in this, using for example my house journal Materials World from IOM3 and twenty or so scientific journals published by IOM3 & Maney Press available worldwide, online to members of the Materials Science Institute (IOM3) as a guide ? Suggestion welcome.

Also I have had a constant niggling that really, I ought to be looking first and foremost at the my own “Metallurgy, Materials, Minerals & Mining Sciences & Technologies, Institute IOM3 and their work and interests, with more commitment. The corpus of online member material-Twenty or so dedicated scientific journals to the above mentionned themes- is well deserving of support and commentry within the wider "paysage" of application, engineering and acknowledgement by society in general in an ever increasing interconnected world.

It has bothered me to find a number of Chemistry bloggers but apparently few Metallurgists and Material Scientists whom I would like to reference in blog links etc. OK, exception made of course for all concerning Nano etc. mostly by physicists chemists, electronics & optical engineers & instrumentalists…

(Cheers in passing are to the Institute of Physics (IOP ) for their many journals and especially for their availability "free-for-one-month" online efforts to be used, may I recall, with due respect and acknowledgement of the scientists who agree to this procedure)

That being said, I have decided in “my minds eye” to list the RSC’s list of main themes for their Journal of Materials Chemistry to borrow the expression “my minds eye” from the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who has also been self-described as "a person where extreme’s meet.”

From The following list of materials chemistry themes has been taken from the RSC journal I believe that will be clear that Materials Chemists and Materials Scientist, will have a lot on their plates in order to meet the high expectations not only of their interdisciplinary peers but also those of Society in general, “Where extremes meet ”!

Journal of Materials Chemistry Review Articles published by the RSC some of which are freely available to non-members.

Further information on the details of “defining materials chemistry” & therefore “the breadth of materials science” is given in the JMCR defined targets for publication. There are three types of reviews specifically materials chemistry orientated:

Applications, Highlights and Feature Articles.

-Applications are interdisciplinary reviews covering the properties and applications of a class of materials. Applications may report new emerging areas of materials application of interest to the materials chemistry community.
-Highlights are short articles that highlight important new developments made in materials chemistry over the past year.
-Feature Articles bring the reader up-to-date with advances in research in a particular field. Key areas of progress and future issues to be addressed are discussed.
From the body of papers published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry throughout 2005-2007, RSC have defined 13 main fields as follows:

1.Biomaterials
Including reviews on drug delivery, implants and bio-mimetic synthesis
2. Composite materials
Including reviews on metal-organic frameworks, organic-inorganic hybrid materials, and biological composites
3. Electronic materials
Including reviews on organic field effect transistors, molecular conductors and conducting polymers
4. Films, layers and coatings
Including reviews on thin film deposition, self-cleaning coatings and porous films
5. Liquid crystals
Including reviews on bent-core liquid crystals, supra-molecular liquid crystals and liquid crystal elastomers
6. Magnetic materials
Including reviews on molecular magnetism, nano-magnetism and magneto-optic materials
7. Materials for energy applications
Including reviews on materials for fuel cells, batteries and solar cells
8. Nanotechnology
Including reviews on anisotropic nanomaterials, carbon nanotubes and applications of nanomaterials
9. Optical materials
Including reviews on electrochromic materials, non-linear optics and fluorescent sensors
10. Polymers and macromolecules
Including reviews on conjugated polymers, stimuli responsive polymers and polymer processing
11. Porous materials
Including reviews on mesoporous silica, porous metals and the applications of porous materials
12. Solid state inorganic materials
Including reviews on layered double hydroxides, oxides and crystallography
13. Theoretical Including reviews on theoretical studies involving nanomaterials, clays and biominerals

Rapid advance in fundamental understanding, measurement and manipulation tooling at minute dimension, better known the general public as "all things Nano-" (10^-9) the predominantly "bottom-up approach of the materials chemist-scientists harbours great expectations.